Homo heidelbergensis is the name given to large-brained, heavily built people who lived in Europe and Africa from about 700 000 to 200 000 years ago. It rests on a single lower jaw dug from a sand pit near Heidelberg in Germany in 1907. For decades it was treated as the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans. Today researchers argue over which fossils belong under the name, whether it should be split, and whether that ancestor story still holds.
A species hung on one jaw
On 21 October 1907 the jaw, heavy and chinless, came out of the Grafenrain sand pit at Mauer, 24 m down in sands laid by the Neckar river. Schoetensack named it in 1908, the second fossil species placed in Homo after the Neanderthals. A 2010 study dated the layer to about 609 000 years, give or take 40 000. A straight-tusked elephant, a rhinoceros and a bison lay in the same sands.
A jaw makes a poor anchor, because few comparable jaws exist and it has few telling features. In 1983 Stringer revived the name for a wider group of skulls from Europe and Africa, which he saw as ancestors of both Neanderthals and modern humans. They include Kabwe 1 from Zambia, found in 1921, 324 000 to 274 000 years old, with a brain of about 1 300 cm³, and Bodo from Ethiopia, found in 1976 and about 600 000 years old.
Homo bodoensis and the muddle in the middle
Researchers call this confusion the muddle in the middle. In 2000 McBrearty and Brooks kept Homo heidelbergensis for Europe and revived Homo rhodesiensis, given to Kabwe in 1921, for African fossils they saw as ancestral to modern humans. DNA then cut into the European group: the 430 000-year-old Sima de los Huesos fossils from Spain, which the Smithsonian still lists under the name, proved closer to Neanderthals than to Denisovans. In Asia, the Harbin skull turned out in 2025 to be Denisovan, and Chinese skulls such as Dali and Jinniushan, placed with Homo heidelbergensis by some, may be too.
In 2021 a team led by Roksandic proposed a new species, Homo bodoensis, named after the Bodo skull. It would take most fossils from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean from 774 000 to 129 000 years ago, and many European ones would become Neanderthals. It would replace both older names, partly to avoid honouring Cecil Rhodes. In 2022 Delson and Stringer rejected it: the rules of zoological naming do not allow a valid name to be replaced because it has been used loosely or because it offends. Others objected too, and Roksandic’s team replied. So one skull can carry several names: Kabwe 1 is rhodesiensis to its first describer, heidelbergensis at the Smithsonian and bodoensis under the proposal.
Common ancestor, or not?
The Smithsonian still describes Homo heidelbergensis as the most likely common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, with the two lines parting 350 000 to 400 000 years ago. Stringer is now less sure: “we no longer know where the ancestry of the Neanderthal lies”, he told Discover in 2022. A 2025 study he co-wrote, based on a reconstructed skull from Yunxian in China, puts the Neanderthal split at about 1.38 million years ago and the split between Homo longi and the line to modern humans at about 1.32 million, too early for Homo heidelbergensis as usually dated. It keeps heidelbergensis as one of five main large-brained branches of the past 800 000 years. That timing rests on an age of about a million years for the skull. A 2026 study dated the Yunxian skulls to about 1.77 million and left open how that changes the result.
Flint at Boxgrove, footprints on a volcano
Few leg bones exist, so its build is uncertain. A shin bone from Boxgrove in southern England, about 500 000 years old, suggests a man about 1.8 m tall and more robust than most people today. Boxgrove then lay below chalk cliffs 200 m high, by a grassy plain and a marsh. A group butchered a horse there and left more than 2 000 scatters of flint from shaping biface knives.
A 2025 study redated the wooden spears from Schöningen in Germany, which the Smithsonian lists at 400 000 years, to about 200 000 and linked them to Neanderthals. Tracks left in fresh volcanic ash at Roccamonfina in Italy about 349 000 years ago are tentatively credited to Homo heidelbergensis, though the team that studied them in 2020 left the species open.
